Word: chaney
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Director Tod Browning, one of the few truly individual directors in the U. S., is a specialist in horror. He is fond of anything that happens underground or in the dark, especially a murder. He prefers lovers who are physically deformed. He directed the late Lon Chaney in most of Chaney's best pictures. Before that he was a spieler for a sideshow, travelled twice around the world with a carnival in which he acted in blackface. Director Browning must have enjoyed making Freaks. It is one of the most macabre pictures ever filmed and it doubtless...
...being retaken and an unusual number have come into being recently. In addition to "Daddy Longlegs," and "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," at least four other old productions are coming out again. They are "The Miracle Man," the show which brought stardom to Thomas Meighan, Rence Adores, and Lon Chaney; "Fireman Save My Child," formerly a Beery-Hatton vehicle; "Smilin' Through," in which Norma Shearer will do the part once taken by Norma Talmadge; and "The Man Who Played God," a story about a musician who becomes deal and learns to read lips which George Arliss will star in again...
Dracula (Universal). Director Tod Browning, who had charge of the best Lon Chaney pictures, has a talent for creating macabre atmosphere by the use of "interiors." He is a director who never, if he can help it, photographs a scene out of doors and then only at night or in a fog. Bram Stoker's famous novel about a vampire who survives hundreds of years after his death by drinking human blood and who is killed at last by a professor who drives a stake through his heart as he lies in his coffin provides ideal material for Browning...
...Chaney's mother was Emma Kennedy, the daughter of a distinguished Coloradoan. She married a good-natured Irish barber who, like herself, was deaf & dumb. Lon, the second of four normal children, left school at the age of nine to take care of her. He could make his mother understand him by contorting his face into significant expressions. At 13 he went to work as a guide to tourists on Pike's Peak. Later he was carpet-layer, stage hand, vaudevillist. He married his singing and dancing partner; their son is a lawyer in Hollywood...
...Chaney's first cinema job, obtained at once for the asking, was riding horses in a Western. After The Hunchback of Notre Dame he was regarded as an expert at disguises, wrote an article on make-up for Encyclopedia Britannica. A ventriloquist in vaudeville, he capitalizes this ability in The Unholy Three. He ascertained he could best imitate a female voice not in falsetto but by speaking quietly and enunciating carefully. Last of the great stars to make a talkie (except Chaplin, who still swears he will never talk), Lon Chaney explained his reluctance by saying that speech would...